The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded grants to two programs administered by the University of Oregon Libraries.

Stephanie Wood received $194,103 for her project, "Mesoamerican Cultures and their Histories: Spotlight on Oaxaca," through the Institutes for School Teachers program. The UO’s National Digital Newspaper Program was awarded $235,000 for Phase Three of the project headed by Karen Estlund.

Wood, director of the Wired Humanities Projects at UO Libraries, will use the NEH funds to take a diverse group of 11 school teachers to Oaxaca, Mexico, next summer. The participants will be immersed in Mesoamerican culture through readings, lectures and experiential learning excursions in Southern Mexico with the purpose of increasing the Mesoamerican content in their U.S. classrooms.

Last year, Wood was selected for a Fulbright Specialists Project in Berlin to further the digital collections of primary source material relating to Mesoamerican cultures and histories. She also received an NEH grant in 2010 for her project, creating an online database for Nuhuatl, the indigenous language of Mexico.

Estlund is the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program director and head of the Digital Scholarship Center for UO Libraries. The NEH grant will allow the program to digitize Oregon Territory newspapers from 1860-1922, creating a free and accessible database that features the racial conflict, women’s rights issues and economic development that shaped Oregon’s early history.

In 2011, Estlund received the Mary Corrigan Solari Library Fellowship award, which is given to library faculty members each year in recognition of their noteworthy contributions to the university and the international community of scholars.

The NEH is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the U.S. This year, $33 million was distributed in grants to 173 humanities projects. University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Lewis and Clark College were the recipients of four grants awarded to Oregon programs.

- by Chloe Huckins, UO Office of Strategic Communications intern